Creating canyons beneath city streets

I stand in the middle of the street in a mist from the underworld. After an evening of storytelling at an urban bookstore, this is my newfound wilderness -- four jets of steam spewing up from a manhole cover. Bathed in city lights, I am astonished to be here.

My home is an isolated cabin in Colorado where I write about the most remote, un-urban places in the world. My imagination, more often triggered by natural experiences, is now at the whims of this glittering, hissing civilization.

Out there, I tend to avoid trails, traveling in places where the track of a human is as startling as a wasp sting. From my journeys, I have written 10 books about the way animals lurk in the dark, about lifelines of water holes that have carried me across the desert. Each is a distillation of experiences that seem strikingly remote in the city. Yet here I stand -- to tell the story of where I’ve been.

And this manhole cover is now my remote place of mystery, where I can imagine the labyrinthine canyons beneath me, so long and twisted that any subtle change in air temperature and humidity will cause an eruption of steam. Even when the red hand begins flashing at the crosswalk, I linger, thinking that this experience is as close as I can get to my world back home. I quickly retreat to let traffic through. The steam sweeps into elegant coils with each passing vehicle.

I’m on tour for a new book and have been moving from city to city, airport to airport. The book, like everything I write, comes out of a journal I carry, one that spills sand from its binding. Those words become a page, and the pages eventually send me into these cities.

I am not alone in this enterprise. The engines of publishing houses churn out hundreds of books about the natural world each year, leaving me to imagine hermits drawn out of their lives, skulking like caged animals on their tours, jerking to the screech of car wheels, latching onto the patterns of pigeons stretched out across the sky.

So what business do we have writing about wilderness? Isn’t there something wrong about inviting people to read about this world and not taste it in their own mouths or experience it with their fingertips? The wilderness porn we write arouses people with tales of adventures they may never have. We may be a short step closer to the wilderness than the televised nature documentaries, but we are still offering an excuse for readers not to see it for themselves.

But there is a secret message in our writing: Even in your armchair or your urban life, you can exercise the skills of perception, appreciate the meaning of disaster or luxuriate in the idea of a life far removed from the pages of a book. The world -- the real world, not just the facsimile from a place far away -- is coming to you at every moment on the rivers of your senses. Open your eyes and you will see it spewing out from beneath the manhole covers all around.

I know it is not always easy. I find that the aperture of my vision grows more constricted in cities. In bookstores and auditoriums, the urgency of my tales becomes less compelling.

Each night I sleep on scratchy-clean hotel sheets, and I take showers far too often, scrubbing the land off my skin. I walk out onto the street amused by the many phantasms, and I struggle to maintain my focus. Still I fall into the ceaseless diversions playing all around me. The city becomes my nature, boulders turned to cars, birds to people, cliffs to engineered monuments of glass and steel.

It seems a sad trade-off, but then something happens. In Seattle, the wilderness becomes the rain sluicing down a particular gutter, cigarette butts and fallen leaves sweeping into a black hole beneath the street. In Portland it is an alley strewn with constellations of garbage and rags. Phoenix gives me a tree rushed by squawking grackles, Salt Lake City a parking lot with graffiti towering up the surrounding buildings.

I soon see the raw things -- those that are not paid for -- that abound in these cities like tree roots muscling up through a sidewalk, and I can hear my own stories changing.

Of course, I still speak of the desert, casting my dreams for the people who have come to hear, speaking as if I were in some isolated ravine or camped on the lee of a sand dune weeks from the nearest road. I still conjure up the images of vultures sweetly spiraling upon an afternoon thermal, of the crags that have scraped away my flesh, of a jaguar print freshly laid in creek sand.

But these moments slip further behind me as I lean into the streets, and I find myself telling audiences that today I listened to a rag-dressed man who kept shouting at the sky as if crying for the stars to come back.

I explain that if you listen to every passing, truncated conversation along the sidewalks you can thread hours of words together, and if you write them all down in your journal, you will find the invisible messages constantly flowing through the city.

It’s just like wilderness, I tell them. Just like the scents on the wind, the tracks of animals, the centuries-old art on rock walls.

Then the lights dim. The audience returns home and the bookstore closes, leaving me to hover by a shroud of steam, like a ghost, hoping to get back to the desert soon before I forget where I came from.